The question as to the inspiration of
the Bible is not a question raised by me.
It is a question that is already up for
discussion through the length and
breadth of this land.
What are we to
do with this book?
How are we to
regard it?
Is it the best book in the
world, or the worst?
Is it a true book,
or is it a false one?
Is it God's book,
or is it man's book?

Over and over again this Book says,
"Hear ye the word of the Lord."
Now,
the message is the word of the Lord, or
it is a lie.
It is the word of the Lord,
as it professes to be, or else it is a cheat,
a swindle, a humbug, a fraud.

To illustrate: A man tells me that
Jesus of Nazareth was a good man; but
then, there were other men just as good.

But while you say, "He was simply
one of many remarkable men," He says,
"I came forth from the Father, and am
come into the world;" and again, "I
leave the world, and go to the Father." He says, "O Father, glorify thou me
with thine own self, with the glory
which I had with thee before the worldwas." Now, do you say he was a good
man and yet he told lies? What is
your idea of a good man?
I do not
believe that a good man lies; and I do
not believe that a man who lies is a
good man.
Perhaps you do, and if so,
you were brought up in a different way
from that in which my father brought
me up.
So I do not believe that a book
packed with lies from one end to the
other, is a good book; and I do not
want any one to come and tell me that
Jesus Christ was a good man, and the
Bible is a good book, but neither of
them tell the truth.
I join issue there.
This book is what it professes to be, or
it is a swindle; Jesus of Nazareth was
what he professed to be, or he was an
impostor.

Suppose a man comes to town and
represents himself as the son of a British
nobleman.
He is well-dressed and has
plenty of money; but after a while they
find out that he is the son of a blacksmith,
down in the next town.
Now I
do not want you to tell me how well
he behaves, what fine broadcloth he
wears, or what a perfect gentleman he
is in all his deportment.
The fact is
that he is a liar, a fraud, and a scamp.
He has come under false colors, and
palmed himself off on the community
under false pretenses; and the more
good things you may say about him the
less I think of him; because if he is
such a well-educated gentleman, he
knows better than to be going around
as a fraud, and deceiving the people.
So we must accept Jesus of Nazareth
and his claims entirely, or else we must
reject the whole gospel as an imposture,
and as the grandest, most stupendous
fraud the world has ever known.

Now, do not be fooled by this talk
about the Bible being "a good book,"
and yet just like many other good
books.
There is not another like it in
the world.
Let us look at some of its peculiarities:

Here is one: The Bible is a book
which has been refuted, demolished,
overthrown, and exploded more times
than any other book you ever heard of.
Every little while somebody starts up
and upsets this book; and it is like upsetting
a solid cube of granite.
It is
just as big one way as the other; and
when you overturn it again, it is right
side up still.
They overthrew the
Bible a century ago, in Voltaire's timeentirely demolished the whole thing.
"In less than a hundred years," said
Voltaire, "Christianity will be swept
from existence, and have passed into
history."
Infidelity ran riot through
France, red-handed and impious.
A [R459 : page 7] century has passed away.
Voltaire's
old printing-press, it is said, has since
been used to print the word of God;
and the very house where he lived has
been packed with Bibles from garret to
cellar, as a depot for the Bible Society.
Up to the year 1800, from four to six
million copies of the Scriptures, in some
thirty different languages, comprised all
that had been produced since the world
began.
Eighty years later, in 1880, the
statistics of eighty different Bible societies
which are now in existence with
their unnumbered agencies and auxiliaries,
report more than 165,000,000
Bibles, Testaments, and portions of
Scripture, with two hundred and six new translations, distributed by Bible
societies alone since 1804; to say nothing
of the unknown millions of Bibles and
Testaments which have been issued and
circulated by private publishers throughout
the world.
For a book that has
been exploded so many times, this book
yet shows signs of considerable life.

I hear of a man traveling around the
country exploding this Book and showing
up "The Mistakes of Moses," at
about two hundred dollars a night.
It
would be worth something after hearing
the infidel on "The Mistakes of Moses,"
to hear Moses on the mistakes of the
infidel.
When Moses could talk back,
he was rather a difficult man to deal with.
Pharaoh tried it, and sank like lead
beneath the waves.
Jannes and Jambres
withstood Moses, and it is said were
buried in the Red sea.
Korah, Dathan,
and Abiram tried it, and went down so
deep that they have not yet got back.
But now Moses is dead, and it is easy to
abuse him.
It does not take a very
brave beast to kick a dead lion.*

*It would be interesting to hear a military
leader and legislator, like "Moses the man of
God," who, after he was eighty years old, commanded
for forty years an army of six hundred
thousand men, emancipating, organizing, and
giving laws to a nation which has maintained its
existence for more than thirty stormy centuries,
give his candid opinion concerning "the mistakes"
of a "Colonel" of cavalry, whose military career
is said to have included one single engagement.

But, after all, this book seems to stand
abuse, and thrive upon refutation.
A
few months ago some learned men,
after working for a number of
years on the revision of the New Testament,
finished their work.
Having inserted
a few modern words instead of
others which had become obsolete, made
some slight corrections of errors in
translation, and rectified from ancient
manuscripts some little errors which had
been made by copyists in transcribing
the book, at last the book was announced
as ready to be issued on a certain
day.
What was the result? Why,
men offered five hundred dollars to get
a copy of that Book a little in advance
of its publication; and the morning it
was published the streets of New York
were blockaded with express wagons
backed up and waiting for copies of
that Book which had been refuted, exploded,
and dead and buried for so
many years.
Millions of copies of that
Book were sold as fast as they could be
delivered.
They telegraphed the whole
of that Book from New York to Chicago,
for the sake of getting it there to print
in a newspaper twenty four hours in
advance of the mail.

A dead book, is it?
They would
not pay for telegraphing the greatest infidel
speech ever delivered in this country.
This old book seems to show some
signs of life yet.

It outlives its foes.
If you could
gather all the books written against it,
you could build a pyramid higher than
Bunker Hill Monument.
Now and
then a man goes to work to refute
the Bible; and every time it is done, it
has to be done over again the next day
or the next year.
And then after its
enemies have done their worst, some of
its professed friends torture and twist
and misrepresent it.
It lives through
all that.
Infidels have been at work for
nearly eighteen hundred years, firing
away at it, and making about as much
impression upon it as you would shooting
boiled peas at Gibraltar.

The fact is, this book has come into
the world, and it seems to have come to
stay.
It is in the world, and I do not
know how you are to get it out.
One
hundred years ago you might have
found that book in twenty or thirty
translations; but now you can find it in
from between two and three hundred
different versions, most of which have
been made in this last progressive, intellectual,
nineteenth century.
All over
the globe it goes; touch any shore and
you will find the Book there before you.

Every one knows that where this
Book has influence it makes things safe.
Why is this?
If it were a bad book,
we should expect to find it in the hands
of the worst men.
If it were a bad book,
you would expect a man to have a revolver
in one pocket and a New Testament
tucked away in another.

What makes the book so different
from all other books?
Whose book is
it?
Who made it?
Infidels have the
strangest ideas of that subject.
I recollect
in Marlboro, Mass., I read in a paper
an article written by an infidel, which
stated that the Council of Nice in the
year 325, compiled the New Testament.
They had a lot of Gospels and Epistles,
genuine and spurious, and no one could
distinguish between the two; so they
put them all on the floor, and prayed
that the good ones might get up on the
communion table and the bad ones stay
on the floor; and that was the way the
present New Testament was compiled.

And that very statement can be found
in infidel books now published in Boston.
This writer said that this account rested
on the authority of Papias, an early
Christian Bishop.
I replied in a lecture,
that there was one difficulty about that
storythat Papias was dead and buried
a hundred and fifty years before the
Council of Nice was held.
The man
rose to explain, and said that this was
not the right Papias, but that it was another
Papias, an obscure Christian
Bishop of the fourth century.
I told
him I thought he was obscure, so obscure
that no one ever heard of him before
or since.
On investigation it was
learned that a German dominie, named
John Pappus, preacher in Strausburg,
and a professor at Munster, who died in
1610, discovered this story in an old
Greek manuscript entitled "Synodikon,"
which was written by some one down
in the dark ages, about the year 900;
for it relates things which occurred as
late as 869, or five hundred years after
the Council of Nice was dead and buried.
And this story, written nobody knows
when, where, or by whom, has been
swallowed, believed, and published by
infidels far and near, as an account of
the origin of the New Testament.

I have on one of my library shelves,
between twenty and thirty volumes, containing
about twelve thousand pages of
the writings of different Christian authors
who wrote before A.D. 325, when the
Council of Nice was held.
These books
are full of Scripture.
Those writers had
the same books which we have; they
quoted the same passages which we
quote; they quoted from the same
books from which we quote.

Says Tertullian, A.D. 200, "If you
are willing to exercise your curiosity
profitably in the business of your salvation,
visit the apostolic churches, in
which the very chairs of the apostles
still preside in their places; in which
their very authentic letters are recited, sounding forth the voice and representing
the countenance of every one of
them.
Is Achaia near you? You have
Corinth.
If you are not far from Macedonia
you have Phillippi and Thessalonica;
if you can go to Asia you have
Ephesus, but if you are near to Italy we
have Rome."

These apostolic churches received the
Gospel at the hands of men who wrote
them; and the epistles were given and
signed by men whom they well knew.
Paul wrote, "The salutation of me,
Paul, by mine own hand, which is the token in every epistle, so I write."

Now, what did these writers testify?
They testified things which they knew.
The Apostle John did not say, "That
which we have dreamed, imagined, or
guessed at, that thing do we declare
unto you;" but "that which was from
the beginning, which we have heard,
which we have seen with our eyes,
which we have looked upon, and our
hands have handled, of the word of
Life." (1 John 1:1.)
This was their testimony.
They testified that they saw Christ in his life and in his death; that
they saw him after his resurrection, and
they knew these things and testified of
them.
They preached Christ, who had
died and risen again.
These Apostles
suffered the loss of all things, and imperilled
their very lives in proclaiming
truth; and they left their testimony on
record in this Book.
Then, the apostles
quote from the prophets, and the
prophets quote from the Psalms, and
refer to the law which was given on
Mount Sinai; and so we go back from
book to book, until we reach the book
of Genesis, and that does not quote
from anybody or anything.
You have
then reached the fountain head.

"But," says one, "I think the Bible
may be a true history."
So you think
it an easy matter to tell the truth, do
you?
I wish you could make other
people think so.
Suppose you go and
read a file of the newspapers published
just before the last election, and see if
you do not think it requires divine inspiration
to tell the truth, or even to find
it out after it is told.
Truth is mighty
hard to get at, as you can see by perusing
the daily papers on the eve of an
election.

There are certain things in the Bible
which, to my mind, bear the impress of
divinity.
A skeptic will tell you what
a race of sinners we read about in the
Bible!
Do you suppose that if the
Bible had been revised by a committee
of eminent divines, and published by
some great religious society, we should
ever have heard of Noah's drunkenness,
of Jacob's cheating, or of Peter's lying,
cursing, or dissembling?
Not at all.
The good men, when they came to such
an incident, would have said, "There is
no use in saying anything about that.
It is all past and gone; it will not help
anything, and it will only hurt the cause." If a committee of such eminent divines
had prepared the Bible, you would have
got a biography of men whose characters
were patterns of piety and propriety.
Sometimes a man writes his own diary,
and happens to leave it for some one to
print after he is dead; but he leaves out
all the mean tricks he ever did, and puts
in all the good acts he can ever think of;
and you read the pages, filled with astonishment,
and think, "What a wonderfully
good man he was!"
But when
the Almighty writes a man's life he tells
the truth about him; and there are not
many who would want their lives printed
if the Almighty wrote them.

When the Lord undertakes to tell his
story of a sinful man he does not select
a poor, miserable beggar, and show him
up; he does not give even the name of
the guilty woman who bathed the Saviour's
feet with her tears; but he takes
King David from the throne and sets
him down in sackcloth and ashes, and
wrings from his heart the cry, "Have
mercy upon me, O God, according to
thy loving-kindness; according to the
multitude of thy tender mercies blot out
all my transgressions."
And then when
he is pardoned, forgiven, cleansed, and
made whiter than snow, the pen of inspiration
writes down the dark, damning
record of his crimes, and the king on his
throne has not power nor wealth or influence
enough to blot the page; and it
goes into history for infidels to scoff at for
three thousand years.
Who wrote that?

You find a man who will tell the truth
about kings, warriors, princes and presidents
to-day, and you may be quite
sure that he has within him the power
of the Holy Spirit.
And a book which
tells the faults of those who wrote it, and
which tells you that "there is none righteous,
no, not one," bears in it the marks
of a true book; for we all know that
men have faults and failings and sins,
and among all the men described in that
Book, every man whose life is recorded
has some defect, some blot, save one,
and that is "the man Christ Jesus."

Men say there are difficulties and absurdities
and errors and contradictions
in the Bible.
After speaking once in the
city of Boston, an infidel came to me
and told me that the Bible was not true,
for there was that story which Moses
told about the quails.
Israel lusted after
flesh, and the Lord sent them quails to
eat, and they fell by the camp a day's
journey on each side, or over a territory
forty miles across, and they were
two cubits deep on the ground, and the
Israelites ate them for about a month.
I have in my possession an infidel paper
which was published in Boston, in
which there is about a column of arguments
and figures on this "quail story;"
giving an estimate of the number of
bushels of quails that were piled up
over the country, and showing that
when they were divided among the six
million Israelites, each Jew would have
2,888,643 bushels of quails, which they
were to eat during the month, giving
each poor Israelite 69,620 bushels of
quail to eat at each meal during the
month; and therefore the Bible was not
true!
I answered that the Bible did
not say any such thing.
He insisted
that it did.
"Well," said I, "find it!"
He could not find the place; so I
turned over to the eleventh chapter of Numbers,
and there read that instead
of the birds being packed like cordwood
on the ground, three feet deep,
the account says that the Lord brought
the quails from the sea, and let them fall
by the camp, as it were "two cubits high," or about three feet high upon or
above the face of the earth.
That is,
instead of flying overhead and out of
reach, they were brought in about three
feet high, where any one could take as
many of them as he chose.
And this
skeptical friend had got the birds packed
solid, three feet deep, over a territory
forty miles across.
As if some one
should say that a flock of geese flew as
high as Bunker Hill Monument, and we
should insist that they were packed solid
from the ground up, two hundred and
twenty-one feet high!
This is a sample
of the arguments to prove that the Bible
is not true!

The book, to my mind, bears the
marks of inspiration in the foresight
which it exhibits.
This Book foretells
things.
You cannot do that.
You cannot
tell what will be next year, or next
week.
"The spirits" cannot tell who
will be the next President.
They may
tell a great many things that are past.
They may tell you who your grandmother
was, and may copy the inscriptions
on your grandfather's grave-stone,
and may tell things which were written
in the family record.
They may reveal
many things in the pastfor the devil
knows about the pastbut they cannot
foretell the future.

The revelations of prophecy are facts [R460 : page 8] which exhibit the divine omniscience.
So
long as Babylon is in heaps, so long as
Nineveh lies empty, void, and waste; so
long as Egypt is the basest of kingdoms;
so long as Tyre is a place for the spreading
of nets in the midst of the sea; so long
as Israel is scattered among all nations;
so long as Jerusalem is trodden under
foot of the Gentiles; so long as the
great empires of the world march on in
their predicted courseso long we have
proof that one omniscient mind dictated
that Book, and "prophecy came not in
old time by the will of man."

We call this Bible a book, but here
are sixty different books, written by [R461 : page 8] thirty or forty different men.
A man
may say, "I do not believe in the book
of Esther." Well, what of that?
We
have sixty-five others left.
What will
you do with them?
A man says, "I
find fault with this chapter or with that."
Suppose you do?
If you were on trial
for murder and had sixty-six witnesses
against you, suppose you impeach one
of them, there are sixty-five left; impeach
another, and you still have sixty-four
left; impeach another, and you
have sixty-threeenough to hang you
up if you are guilty.
Do you not see that
you cannot impeach this Book unless
you do it in detail?
Each book bears
its own witness, and stands by itself on
its own merits; and yet each book is
linked with all the rest.
Blot out one, if
you can.
I am inclined to think it
would be difficult to do this.
This book
is built to stay together; it is inspired
by one Spirit.

The authorship of this Book is wonderful.
Here are words written by kings,
by emperors, by princes, by poets, by
sages, by philosophers, by fishermen, by
statesmen; by men learned in the wisdom
of Egypt, educated in the schools
of Babylon, trained up at the feet of
rabbis in Jerusalem.
It was written by
men in exile, in the desert, and in shepherd's
tents, in "green pastures" and beside
"still waters."
Among its authors
we find the fishermen, the tax-gatherer,
the herdsman, the gatherer of sycamore
fruit; we find poor men, rich men, statesmen,
preachers, exiles, captains, legislators,
judgesmen of every grade and
class.
The authorship of this Book is
wonderful beyond all other books.

And what a book it isfilled with
law, ethics, prophecy, poetry, history,
genealogy, sanitary science, political
economy.
It contains all kinds of writing;
but what a jumble it would be if
sixty-six books were written in this way
by ordinary men.
Suppose, for instance,
that we get sixty-six medical
books written by thirty or forty different
doctors of various schools, believers
in allopathy, homeopathy, hydropathy,
and all the other opathies, bind them all
together, and then undertake to doctor
a man according to that book!
What
man would be fool enough to risk
the results of practicing such a system
of medicine?
Or, suppose you get
thirty-five editors at work writing treatises
on politics, and then see if you can
find any leather strong enough to hold
the books together when they have got
through.

But again, it took fifteen hundred
years to write this Book, and the man
who wrote the closing pages of it had no
communication with the man who commenced
it.
How did these men, writing
independently, produce such a book?
Other books get out of date when they
are ten or twenty years old: but this
book lives on through the ages, and
keeps abreast of the mightiest thought
and intellect of every age.

Suppose that thirty or forty men
should walk in through that door.
One
man comes from Maine, another from
New Hampshire another from Massachusetts,
and so on from each state, each
bearing a block of marble of peculiar
shape.
Suppose I pile up these blocks
in order until I have the figure of a man,
perfectly symmetrical and beautifully
chiseled, and I say, "How did these
men, who had never seen each other,
chisel out that beautiful statue?"
You
say, "That is easily explained.
One
man planned that whole statue, made
the patterns, gave the directions, distributed
them around; and so, each man
working by the pattern, the work fits
accurately when completed."
Very
well.
Here is a book coming from all
quarters, written by men of all classes,
scattered through a period of fifteen
hundred years; and yet this book is
fitted together as a wondrous and harmonious
whole.
How was it done?
"Holy men of God spake as they were
moved by the Holy Ghost."
One mind
inspires the whole Book, one voice
speaks in it all, and it is the voice of
God.

Again, I conclude that this book has
in it the very breath of God, from the
effect that it produces upon men.
There
are men who study philosophy, astronomy,
geology, geography, and mathematics,
but did you ever hear a man say,
"I was an out-cast, a wretched inebriate,
a disgrace to my race, and a nuisance
in the world, until I began to study
mathematics, and learned the multiplication
table, and then turned my attention
to geology, got me a little hammer,
and knocked off the corners of the rocks
and studied the formation of the earth;
but since that time I have been as happy
as the day is long; I feel like singing
all the time, my soul is full of triumph
and peace; and health and blessing
have come to my desolate home once
more."
Did you ever hear a man
ascribe his redemption and salvation
from intemperance and sin and vice to
the multiplication table, or the science
of mathematics or geology?
But I can
bring you, not one man, or two,
or ten, but men by the thousand
who will tell you, "I was wretched; I
was lost; I broke my poor old mother's
heart; I beggared my family; my wife
was broken hearted and dejected; my
children fled from the sound of their
father's footstep; I was ruined, reckless,
helpless, homeless, hopeless until I heard
the words of that Book!"
And since
that word entered his heart he will tell
you that hope has dawned upon his vision;
that joy has inspired his heart;
and that his mouth is filled with grateful
song.
He will tell you that the blush
of health has come back to his poor
wife's faded cheek; that the old hats
have vanished from the windows of his
desolate home; that his rags have been
exchanged for good clothes; that his
children run to meet him when he
comes; that there is bread on his
table, fire on his hearth, and comfort in
his dwelling.
He will tell you all that,
and he will tell you that the Book has
done the work.
Now, this Book is
working just such miracles, and is doing
it every day.
If you have any other
book that will do such work as this,
bring it along.
The work needs to be
done; if you have the book that will do
it, bring it out.
But for the present,
while we are waiting for you, as we
know this Book will do the work, we
propose to use it until we can get something
better.

Christians sometimes try to defend the
word of God, but it is its own best witness
and defender.
The best thing for
us to do is to bring out the word of God,
and let "the word of the Spirit" prove
its own power, as it pierces "even to the
dividing asunder of soul and spirit."

The Book is its own witness.
It bears
its own fruits and tells its own story.
It
is a sorrowful fact that you can hardly
go into a prayer-meeting but you are
likely to hear a quotation from Scripture
that is not in the Bible and never was.
You may hear, "In the midst of life we
are in death," from the Prayer-book;
"He tempers the wind to the shorn
lamb," from an old romance; "God unchangeably
ordains whatsoever comes
to pass," from the Catechism; accompanied
by passages misquoted, misunderstood,
and misapplied, which show that
the people do not study their Bibles and
do not understand them.
We need to read the Bible, to search it, study it,
believe it, and obey it, and we shall find
that it is the word of salvation to the
perishing, and that it is filled with sanctifying
power.

But, says one, "I do not understand
the Bible.
I read it, but I cannot make
anything of it."
"How do you read
your Bible?"
"Oh, I read a chapter
now and then; I read it here and there."
Suppose your boy comes home from
school and says, "I can't make anything
of this arithmetic; it is all dark to me."
You say to him, "How did you study
it?"
"Oh, I read a little at the beginning,
and then I turned to the middle
and read a little here and there, and
skipped backward and forward.
But I
don't understand it; I can't see into it."

You say to him, "My son, that is not
the way to understand arithmetic.
You
must begin with the simplest elements,
and master every principle, learn every
rule, solve every problem, and thus the
whole book will open to you as you go
on."

Take the Bible, and read it from beginning
to end, and see how it comesout? You will find it the grandest and
most thrilling story the world has ever
known.
Begin at the beginning, and
read until you find out who is the hero
of the story.
You will find that the
presence of one person pervades the
whole book.
If you go into the British
navy-yard, or on board a British vessel,
and pick up a piece of rope, you will
find that there is one little colored thread which runs through the whole of itthrough every foot of cordage which
belongs to the British governmentso,
if a piece of rope is stolen, it may be cut
into inch pieces, but every piece has the
mark which tells where it belongs.
It
is so with the Bible.
You may separate
it into a thousand parts, and yet you
will find one thoughtone great fact
running through the whole of it.
You
will find it constantly pointing and referring
to one great Personage"the seed of
the woman" that shall crush the serpent's
head; the seed of Abraham, in whom
all the nations of the earth shall be
blessed; the seed of David, who shall
sit on David's throne, and reign forever;
the despised and rejected sufferer, the
"man of sorrows," "the Christ of God,"
born in Bethlehem, crucified on Calvary,
rising triumphant from Joseph's tomb,
ascending to sit at God's right hand,
and coming again to judge the world
and reign as King and Lord of all forever.
Around this one mighty Personage
this whole book revolves.
"To him
give all the prophets witness;" and this
Book, which predicts his coming in its
earliest pages, which forshadows his person
and his ministry through all its observances,
types, and sacred prophecies,
reveals in its closing lines the eternal
splendors which shall crown and consummate
his mighty work.

At the beginning of the Bible we find
a new world: "In the beginning God
created the heavens and the earth."
At
the end of the Bible we find a new world:
"I saw a new heaven and a new earth;
for the first heaven and the first earth
were passed away."
At the beginning,
we find Satan entering to deceive and
destroy; at the end we find Satan cast
out, "that he should deceive the nations
no more."
At the beginning, sin and
pain and sorrow and sighing and death
find entrance to the world; at the end,
there shall be no more pain nor sorrow,
no sighing, and no more death.
At the
beginning, the earth, for man's transgression,
is cursed with thorns and thistles;
at the end, "there shall be no more
curse, but the throne of God and of the
Lamb shall be in it."
At the beginning,
we find the tree of life in paradise, from
which the sinner is shut away by a
flaming sword, lest he eat and live forever;
at the end, we find the tree of life
again "in the midst of the paradise of
God," and the blessed and the blood-washed
ones have a right to the tree of
life, and "enter in through the gates
into the city."
At the beginning, man
was beneath the dominion of death and
the grave; at the end, "the dead, small
and great, stand before God," the sea
gives up its dead, and death and hell
are destroyed in the lake of fire.
At the
beginning, the first Adam lost his dominion
over earth, and was driven out
of the garden of Eden in shame and sorrow;
at the end, we find the second
Adam, victorious over sin and death,
enthroned as King and Lord of all, and
reigning in triumph and glory forever.

Now, when you get the plan of this
Book, you find that it is something more
than a book of detached sentences, good
maxims, and comforting words.
It is a
Book which unfolds the divine purpose,
and reveals not only the way of salvation,
but it marks the pathway of the
people of God through this wilderness,
and reveals the destiny of the world and
the church.

When we look at these facts we see
that this is no man-made book.
When
Columbus discovered the river Orinoco,
some one said he had found an island.
He replied: "No such river as that flows
from an island.
That mighty torrent
must drain the waters of a continent."
So this Book comes, not from the empty
hearts of impostors, liars and deceivers;
it springs from the eternal depths of
divine wisdom, love and grace.
It is the
transcript of the Divine Mind, the unfolding
of the divine purpose, the revelation
of the divine will.
God help us
to receive it, to believe it, and be saved
through Christ our Lord!